AID FOR FOREIGN NATIONS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 69, Issue 263, 19 August 1949, Page 3

AID FOR FOREIGN NATIONS

Investment by U.S. Businessmen BIG SUM AVAILABLE (N.Z.P. A.—Copyright) NEW YORK, August 17. The United States Secretary of the Interior (Mr Julius Krug) said to-day that United States businessmen were prepared to invest 300,000,000,000 dollars in foreign countries. The “New York Times,” reporting this, said that Mr Krug was amplifying a pledge given earlier at 3 United Nations conference on world resources, in which he said that the United States would help to develop backward nations.

Mr Krug said that competent experts had informed him that that sum would be available from American investors to carry out the fourth point of President Truman’s programme “for peace and freedom.” [Speaking at his inauguration for a second term as President, Mr Truman said that the United States “must embark on a bold new programme for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of u,nder-developed areas. . . In cooperation with other nations we should foster capital investment in areas needing development. Our aim should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their own efforts, to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, more mechanical power to lighten their burdens. . . It must be a worldAvide effort for the achievement of peace, freedom and plenty. With the co-oper-ation of business, private capital, agriculture, and labout in this country, this programme can greatly increase industrial activity in other nations and raise substantially their standards of living.”} Mr Krug added that there would have to be the right political atmosphere in countries requiring aid.

Such an investment would be 10 or 15 times greater than the amount the United States intended to give Western Europe under the Marshall Plan.